Tesco workers in Sligo and Carrick-on-Shannon have added further dates to their planned industrial action.
The Tesco workers are currently scheduled to strike tomorrow, Friday, 14 December with Carrick-on-Shannon workers also striking on the 22 December. The Sligo cohort will now also strike on 21 & 22 December.
Mandate General Secretary John Douglas said: “Our members do not want to be on strike. No worker does. But when a major multinational and highly profitable retailer is constantly undermining your working conditions and your right to be represented by your trade union, you are not left with many options.”
“You can either roll over and take it, or you can fight back and I commend the Sligo and Carrick-on-Shannon workers for choosing to fight back.”
The scheduled industrial action follows a strike by Sligo’s workers last week on 6 December.
According to Mandate, “the dispute dates back to April 2017 when the workers first raised a collective grievance which was ignored by local management.”
“The workers then followed the company’s procedures and passed the grievance to their local trade union official who wrote ten separate letters to the company attempting to resolve the issue before it escalated. Tesco didn’t respond to any of those letters.”
Tesco has issued a response, following the announcement of further strikes:
“The store will be fully open from 8am until 10pm and will continue to offer all of Tesco’s range of products.
“Despite the disruption, we hope customers will come to the store in the very significant numbers as they did last week when another unwelcome one-day disruption was inflicted on Sligo, its businesses and their employees. We regret this action by Mandate for our customers in the run up to Christmas.
“Tesco condemns this further unnecessary one-day strike by Mandate and its plan to run additional two-day stoppages next week in Sligo and a one-day stoppage in Carrick-on-Shannon. This strike action by Mandate is outside the company and union’s agreed procedures and it is reckless by Mandate to unnecessarily disrupt these stores and these two towns when they should be benefitting from peak Christmas trade.
“This unwarranted strike action at this busy time in a very competitive market place will detrimentally impact our customers and therefore the stores and our colleagues in the long term.”
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